Sarah Kavanagh got the phone call last July while she was at her receptionist's job in London. "Are you sitting down?" her agent asked. "Yeah, I'm a receptionist, that's my job," was Sarah's reply. Then he told her he had sold her first novel and an unwritten second one to Hodder and Stoughton for £40,000. "My mouth went dry. I went into shock. The phones were all ringing on the switchboard and I just looked at them and went into the toilets and got sick."
The book that caused Sarah's temporary illness, Wired to the Moon, has just been published. It's the story of Frankie, who sings karakoe at a pub called Caesar's Palace. He enters the Wexford heat of the Irish Elvis Lookalike Contest. Frankie is 32. He lives with his mammy in a place called Loughfergus. He wins the Wexford Elvis heat and gets to go to the Dublin finals. He gets kidnapped. He escapes, aided by a nun. Along the way, he falls in love with (and sleeps with), Carmel, who turns out to be his sister. Ah well, is it any more or less farfetched than all those Elvis sightings we've been hearing ever since the King toppled from the throne?
There are restrictions to what the public is allowed to read about Elvis, however. Wired to the Moon is permeated throughout with song lyrics, most of them the King's. "The people who look after the Elvis Presley estate had to vet the book before we could publish it," Sarah relates. "They wouldn't give us permission to quote the lyrics unless I took out references to Elvis being fat."
Sarah's father is a bit of an Irish Elvis himself, being the entertainer Val Doonican. "I grew up in England, but I've always been driving backwards and forwards in my red Mini to see all my Irish relations in Waterford."
On the way back from one of her visits to Ireland, Sarah was waiting to board the ferry in Dublin when she heard Gay Byrne on the radio at the terminal. "He was launching a talent competition to look for the Irish Elvis. I was just standing there and I saw Frankie in my head, clear as a snapshot. When I got on the ferry, I started writing his story."
Wired to the Moon took three-and-a-half years to write. "I was working full time as well," Sarah says. "What really kept me going was being part of a creative writing group in London's City Lit University.
Wired to the Moon has a contemporary setting, which Sarah describes as "a bit retro," but the overall impression is of a novel with a decidedly 1950s aura to it. " `Caesar's Palace' was written in big, bold neon capitals. The pub had stood at the crossroads for eighty-five years. There were a few ruffled feathers when Hank Green came back to Loughfergus after nine years away, ripped down the old sign and called up the electricians, but nobody could stay angry with him for long. Hank was the man. He was the Saturday night hop and the social club and the summer fete rolled into one."
Much has been written about the authenticity - or perceived lack of same - in the version of Ireland as seen by second generation Irish writers. The Irelands of Frank McCourt and Martin McDonagh may not be places the resident Irish easily recognise, but their validity is located in that second-generation interpretation of a country, remarkable for its unsentimentality.
"Yeah, I read Angela's Ashes. So did my dad. He cried all the way through it because his own dad was an alcoholic, too. I thought it was great but I didn't like the negativity of it. I mean, I don't know any violent drunk Irish people," Sarah says. "I never saw any of Martin McDonagh's plays. I was too skint to go to the theatre at the time when they were playing in London," she confesses.
"Do I see myself as an Irish writer or an English writer? A bit of both, I suppose. I think I was lucky with Wired to the Moon. I caught a wave. It has an Irish setting and it also has the rock 'n' roll element to it. I think the publishers saw the book as being immediately marketable."
Sarah gave up the day job recently to work on her second novel, which is due for delivery at Christmas. It is set in a retirement home for theatrical people in England. Her central character is a London-Irish girl. "It's based on people I used to know as a kid - 70-year-old strippers and the like."
Wired to the Moon (£10 in UK) is published by Hodder and Stoughton.